The Soviet Union has fallen, and some might like to
think that Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s ‘bitter truth’ is a relic of a happily
bygone era. Not so. His speech is even more relevant today.
Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s commencement address at
Harvard University was a shot heard round the world on June 8, 1978. It shocked
many at the time, but was too quickly forgotten. The crowd at Harvard that
afternoon numbered about 20,000. Solzhenitsyn was a fervent anti-communist and
survivor of the Soviet Union’s murderous gulag labor camps, but that wasn’t
what he came to talk about.
The West is spiritually sick, Solzhenitsyn told his audience.
Therefore, it is ill-equipped to rescue the oppressed from their captivity,
especially those held captive by the tyranny of communism. Our excesses and
materialism are doing us in, he warned.
Solzhenitsyn won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature for his
powerful writing on communist oppression and spiritual emptiness. His 1962
novel, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” described life in a Stalinist
labor camp. By 1973 Solzhenitsyn had published “The Gulag Archipelago,” which
exposed the system of labor camps in far greater detail, resulting in his 1974
expulsion from the Soviet Union.
The Harvard
address is also known by the title, “A World Split Apart.”
It follows up on Solzhenitsyn’s earlier speeches compiled in a volume called “Warning to the West.”
The Harvard speech begins:
Harvard’s motto is ‘Veritas.’ Many of you have
already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that
truth eludes us as soon as our concentration begins to flag, all the while
leaving the illusion that we are continuing to pursue it. This is the source of
much discord. Also, truth seldom is sweet; it is almost invariably bitter. A
measure of bitter truth is included in my speech today, but I offer it as a
friend, not as an adversary.
Of course, the Soviet Union has since fallen, and some might like
to think that Solzhenitsyn’s “bitter truth” is a relic of a happily bygone era.
Not so. His speech is even more relevant today.
The ‘Me Decade’ Setting
Solzhenitsyn spoke against a backdrop of social malaise in the
West that was fast devolving into a wave of social decay. In 1974, the United
States granted him asylum, so he had four years to reflect upon the state of
American society and culture by the time he spoke at Harvard.
In June 1978, the Cold War was still in full swing despite arms
control talks and work towards a détente with the Soviet Union. The Watergate
hearings and Vietnam War were behind us, but not their social fallout. Jimmy
Carter, a decent but ineffective man, was in the White House. As he publicly
took the Soviet Union to task for human rights abuses, political prisoners
there suffered more, and his feckless response to the December 1979 Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan was to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
The 1970s
also brought seismic changes in American culture. The Supreme Court’s
1973 Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions
legalized all types of abortions through all nine months of pregnancy. Academia
was deep in the process of replacing the humanities with grievance studies
(i.e., gender studies, ethnic studies, queer studies, etc.), fanning the flames
of identity politics and fueling the metastasis of today’s political
correctness.
It was a
time of encounter groups, the growth of cults like Scientology and Synanon, and
Jerry Brown’s first stint as “Governor Moonbeam” in California. The late Tom
Wolfe labelled the self-absorption of the era as “The Me Decade.”
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was at the height of both its military
power and the Brezhnev Era’s overall stagnation. Soviet citizens displayed
cravings for all things Western: blue jeans, rock and roll, well-made goods,
private cars. Soviet citizens spent many of their waking hours standing in long
lines for difficult-to-come-by amenities like toilet paper, quality lipstick,
or oranges. A malaise was spreading, with food shortages and the economic
inertia inherent in communism. The Politburo—the inner circle of Soviet
leadership—had become a gerontocracy on virtual life support.
Political prisoners were sent not only to Soviet gulags but to
abusive psychiatric wards where they were broken in mind and spirit. Yet a
strong resistance to the regime’s oppression was building within the Soviet
Union. The Helsinki Accords resulted in efforts to monitor Soviet human rights
abuses. Helsinki Watch groups were spearheaded in Moscow by leaders like Nobel
laureate in physics Andrei Sakharov and his activist wife Yelena Bonner.
Despite all of the above, and the great split between the
Democratic West and Communist East, most American analysts could not foresee
the imminent fall of the Soviet Union. All the while, Solzhenitsyn could see
that the West’s decadence disqualified it as a liberator capable of binding up
the wounds of a post-totalitarian East.
The Split Remains
Profound
Solzhenitsyn said this about the nature of the world split apart:
“The truth is that the split is both more profound and more alienating, that
the rifts are more numerous than one can see at first glance.” They involved a
multiplicity of differences between many distinct cultures, including China,
India, the Muslim world, and numerous cultures around the globe.
At the time, however, several Western scholars theorized there
would be a “convergence,” in which all cultures would accept the Western way of
life, a sort of cultural imperialism that continues today as the United Nations
bureaucracy seeks to impose ever-devolving Western sexual mores in developing
nations. It also gave rise to the idea that there would be a convergence
between the West and the Soviet Union.
This sort of utopian vision remains ever the same, although the
name today seems to have changed from “convergence” to “globalism.” Its
advocates are perhaps even more entrenched today than back in 1978 when they
were still dreaming of a European Union, often referring to it as a “United
States of Europe”
Today, many European leaders stubbornly continue to insist on
encouraging policies such as uncontrolled immigration of populations unable or
unwilling to assimilate. They cling perhaps to what Solzhenitsyn called “a
soothing theory” of convergence, a theory that “overlooks the fact that these
worlds are not at all evolving towards each other and that neither one can be
transformed into the other without violence.”
Solzhenitsyn’s Look at
the West’s Shortcomings
The Harvard speech is a must-read for our times, a diagnosis of
what ails us, whether or not you agree with all of it. Below I’ve listed some
of the symptoms and concerns that Solzhenitsyn shared in it. We ought to
consider them thoughtfully and address them, because I fear they’ve gone
without treatment and are even more ingrained today.
The decline in civic courage was
the “most striking feature” of the West, to Solzhenitsyn’s eyes. He could see
it happening in Western countries, political parties, and the United Nations.
Moreover, he said, “Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable
among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of
courage by the entire society.” Along with this is a loss of will in the West.
We can’t defend ourselves if we are not willing to die for anything: “there is
little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being.”
Dependency. The
welfare state and our ever increasing desire for material goods doesn’t bode
well for anybody, Solzhenitsyn noted. He made an analogy with the biological
reality that “a high degree of habitual well being is not advantageous to a
living organism.” Our declining self-reliance, consumerism, and material
cravings have eroded our capacity to develop and grow.
On hyper-individualism: “Voluntary
self-restraint is almost unheard of: everybody strives towards further
expansion to the extreme limit of the legal frames . . . I have spent all my
life under a communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any
objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other
scale but the legal one is also less than worthy of man.”
When laws are passed without regard
to virtue, there will be Hell to pay. We end up in what Solzhenitsyn called
“an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.”
Our excessive and unchecked freedom is
leading to evil. When individual rights become extreme, taking precedence over
human obligations, we end up in a situation in which certain individuals accrue
so much power that society becomes defenseless against them.
This tilt towards evil has come about gradually. Its source is the
humanistic idea that human beings don’t have any evil within themselves. So we
end up shifting blame to a political system, or claiming that it’s all
society’s fault. Solzhenitsyn’s most profound expression of this point comes
from “The Gulag Archipelago”: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the
heart of every human being.”
Media as unelected
arbiters of our society and culture. Solzhenitsyn called out the
carelessness and superficiality (“psychic diseases of the twentieth century”)
that he saw in the Western press. Obviously, when journalism becomes
propaganda, we’re in deep trouble. He stated: “the press has become the
greatest power within the Western countries, exceeding that of the legislature,
the executive, and the judiciary. Yet one would like to ask: According to what
law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?”
Political correctness. In 1978,
the term “political correctness” hadn’t yet come into circulation. But he
talked about it, referring to it as a fashion in thinking, or a prevailing fad
in how we’re supposed to think. He challenged the way political correctness
prevents true scholarship and independent thinking, warning us to shun it
because it only creates “dangerous herd instincts.”
Political correctness functions as “a sort of petrified armor
around people’s minds,” he warned. That, of course, sets us all up for
collapse. The illusions of political correctness will be broken as all
illusions are: “by the inexorable crowbar of events.”
Socialism is death.
Solzhenitsyn made sure we understood that his criticism of the West was by no
means intended as a defense of socialism. In the Harvard speech, he cited the
now out-of-print book “The Socialist Phenomenon”
by the mathematician Igor Shafarevich, and condemned socialism completely with
this: “Socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the
human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.”
The West is no model for
growth. It’s in a state of “spiritual exhaustion.” Its mass
commercialism, technologies, and mass living habits have produced in us a
stupor, disqualifying the West from being a model to the rest of the world.
Solzhenitsyn contrasted the effects of our complacency with the effects of the
suffering that victims of totalitarianism endured. He observed how such
suffering tempers the human spirit, and produces “stronger, deeper, and more
interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western
well-being.”
Solzhenitsyn
also remarked on the political short-sightedness in the West, especially in the
case of moral relativists who open the door to totalitarianism. “Only moral
criteria can help the West against communism’s well-planned world strategy.
There are no other criteria.”
He actually mentioned American historian and political advisor
George Kennan by name, condemning his advice to unilaterally disarm. “If you
only knew how the youngest of the officials in Moscow’s Old Square roar with
laughter at your political wizards!” In the shadow of the Vietnam War, he
called out antiwar activists as “accomplices in the betrayal of Far Eastern
nations, in the genocide and the suffering today imposed on thirty million
people there.”
Secular Humanism and Its
Consequences
The Harvard Speech also sheds light on the source of our ailments:
the secular humanism that came out of the Enlightenment, along with its
celebration of material and technological progress that moved us away from
faith, and set us up to be our own gods.
All of a sudden, after we “recoiled from the spirit and embraced
all that is material,” the West “found itself in its present state of
weakness.” It’s logical then to look at the foundation of our humanistic
thinking. If we couldn’t or wouldn’t admit to any intrinsic evil in man, if our
whole and only goal was to gain happiness on earth, then what?
If we couldn’t or wouldn’t admit to any
intrinsic evil in man, if our whole and only goal was to gain happiness on
earth, then what?
Well, this creates a vacuum, or as Solzhenitsyn put it: “gaps were
left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today.” As we achieve the
“rights of man” our responsibility to God—and therefore also to our fellow
man—continues to grow dim.
So what happened? Well, according to Solzhenitsyn, there grew “an
unexpected kinship” between the Enlightenment and the forces of
totalitarianism. The West succumbed to the temptations of material progress,
and the appetite for shiny objects grew while eating. As we reached towards
material progress, we lost our moorings and forgot about God.
So, as humanism became more materialistic, socialists and
communists could easily apply those ideas to suit their own agendas: “Karl Marx
was able to say, in 1844, that ‘communism is naturalized humanism.’ . . . It is
no accident that all of communism’s rhetorical vows revolve around Man (with a
capital M) and his early happiness. Humanism which has lost its Christian
heritage cannot prevail in this competition.”
As Solzhenitsyn describes it, the process has become ever more
acute: “Liberalism was inevitably pushed aside by radicalism, radicalism had to
surrender to socialism, and socialism could not stand up to communism. The
Communist regime in the East could endure and grow due to the enthusiastic
support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who (feeling the
kinship!) refused to see communism’s crimes, and when they no longer could do
so, they tried to justify these crimes.”
Is the West Dying
Out—and Why?
So, is the West committing suicide or dying of natural causes—or
by serious accident? The West continues to suffer from the maladies that
Solzhenitsyn described so well. We’re sick. Some think we’re dying.
Recently,
Federalist author John Daniel Davidson challenged the
thesis of Jonah Goldberg’s book “Suicide of the West,”
which argues the great prosperity and freedom we enjoy is a miracle produced by
capitalism and constitutionalism, which took off at the dawn of the
Enlightenment. But the miracle is threatened by many social forces, including
tribalism, nationalism, populism, and identity politics.
The very forces that gave rise to our
material wealth and well-being planted the virus: the Enlightenment and its
siren song to materialism.
Davidson
responds that if the West is dying, it is of natural causes. The very forces
that gave rise to our material wealth and well-being planted the virus: the
Enlightenment and its siren song to materialism. (For an excellent summary of
some current debate on the Enlightenment today—and age-old commentary as
well—see Ben Domenech’s recent
Federalist article.)
Davidson’s argument is in sync with the Harvard speech, while
Goldberg’s is not. It is interesting to note that in the index of Goldberg’s
book, there are zero references to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and perhaps that is
intended, for whatever reason. But I think the omission also reveals some fault
lines since Solzhenitsyn was such a powerful twentieth-century voice on the
diseases that afflict the West. Of course, many took offense at Solzhenitsyn’s
speech back then, and perhaps still do.
Davidson echoes Solzhenitsyn in his critique: “Maybe the only way
forward is to go back and discover the things we left behind at the dawn of the
Enlightenment,” things he says Goldberg is not very interested in. Our wayward
path, says Davidson, was all spelled out in one of the most prescient of all
writings of the twentieth century: C.S. Lewis’s “The Abolition of Man.” Indeed,
Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech seems infused with the spirit of Lewis’s essay.
The disaster was inside each one of us,
he says, because we refused to see it when we made man the measure of all
things.
Davidson notes: “Lewis’s larger argument in “The Abolition of Man”
is that man’s conquest of nature is chimerical; it ends with nature’s conquest
of man. Having debunked all tradition and morality through the wonders of
applied science, having succeeded in reducing all of human life to mere
biological functions that can be precisely manipulated, mankind will ‘be
henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be.’”
It’s all there in Solzhenitsyn’s iconic speech: our path away from
God, our worship of technologies, our addictions to pleasure and leisure that
atrophy our capacity for growth, our spiritual void—all leading inevitably
toward death. The disaster was inside each one of us, he says, because we
refused to see it when we made man the measure of all things, “imperfect man
who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other
defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised
at the beginning of the journey.”
Not that we weren’t warned.
Is This the End—Or a
Major Turning Point?
Solzhenitsyn suggested that even though our species is imbued with
disaster, perhaps today’s crisis does not signify the end. Maybe instead we are
at a watershed moment in history, akin to the shift from the Middle Ages to the
Renaissance.
It’s easy to discount this optimistic idea today, knowing that
Solzhenitsyn spoke 40 years ago. The world has since gone through many more
convulsions technologically, socially, culturally, and spiritually. On the
other hand, maybe the slope we’ve been on has been so slippery that we have no
choice but to hit rock bottom before we can get up and come to our senses.
Solzhenitsyn advised that if we are to
get through such a massive shift, we must rise to the occasion.
There’s no predicting when “the end” will come. So perhaps we’ve
spent these 40 years wandering in the wilderness. I believe that in 2018, just
as in 1978, there is great hope as long as there are enough people with the
spiritual courage, vision, and the will to prevail over evil.
They may be unsung, but there are many more than we know,
certainly far more than enough to make a difference. They need only speak out
to one another within the hidden sphere that Czech freedom fighter Vaclav Havel
spoke of in his essay “The Power of the Powerless.” Expanding that sphere
builds a ripple effect of freedom.
At the end of his speech, Solzhenitsyn advised that if we are to
get through such a massive shift, we must rise to the occasion. The times
demand a rebirth of spiritual fervor and a strong sense of vision in which we
achieve a new equilibrium. This means, he says, that we do not curse our
physical nature, as was done in the Middle Ages and among today’s
transhumanists. But neither will we allow the trampling of our spiritual being,
as is being done in the Modern Era.
In the end: “This ascension is similar to climbing onto the next
anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but upward.”
Stella
Morabito is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow Stella on Twitter.